IV

THE WEST

WHEN the father of Fenimore Cooper took his family to Central New York, a little more than a century ago, Central New York was still a Western wilderness. Amid the numerous conventions of Cooper's Leather-Stocking stories, then, there emerge many traces of actual experience which show what our Western country used to be. In this aspect, the conclusion of the Leather-Stocking stories is significant. The pioneer hero starts alone for a wilderness more Western still, pressed by the inconvenient growth of population in the regions where he has passed his mature life. The types of Western immigrants thus suggested are those most frequently kept in mind by tradition; and probably the most admirable Western settlers were on the one hand such people as the elder Cooper, who went to establish in a previously unbroken country new and grander fortunes, and, on the other hand, such personages as Fenimore Cooper idealised in his most popular hero. These latter, of whom perhaps the most familiar in traditional memory is Daniel Boone, were people adventurously impatient of conventions, who betook themselves with constantly fresh restlessness to places where, in virtue of solitude, they could live as independently as they chose. In this type, however, as the very popularity it achieved with European revolutionists would show, there was something more like reversion than development. Far enough from the ideal primitive man of the French Revolution, they tended in virtues 、 and in vices alike rather back towards primitive manhood than forward towards maturer society. As we have already seen in

7

various ways, national inexperience, which marks all American history until well into the present century, had tended to retard the variation of our native character from the original type of seventeenth-century England. Such complete relaxation of social experience as was involved in the temper and conduct of the pioneers tended to throw them back toward the kind of human nature which had vanished from the old world with the middle ages. Something of the kind, indeed, is apparent even in remote districts of New England. In many parts of the West, it was once frequent enough to be characteristic.

Another kind of Western settler has been less generally remarked. Among the New York Literati preserved from oblivion by Poe was Mrs. Kirkland, who happened about 1840 to pass three or four years in Michigan, then a sparsely settled Western region. Between 1839 and 1846, she published three books dealing with her Western experiences: "A New Home,” “Forest Life,” and “Western Clearings." In themselves little more than such good-humoured sketches as any clever, well-bred woman might write in correspondence, these books vividly show how the West once appeared to a cultivated Eastern observer. One fact which she treats as a matter of course is historically suggestive. When the country where the scene of her stories is laid began to get tamed, the more shiftless settlers were apt to avoid the increasing strenuousness of life by moving as much farther West as they could beg, borrow, or steal means to go. These personages typify an element of Western society which has been there from the beginning. That vast new region of ours has been partly settled, no doubt, by such admirable energy as is typified by the elder Cooper or Mrs. Kirkland herself. It has been partly settled, too, by the primitive, vigorous restlessness of the better sort of pioneers. Along with these admirably constructive types of character, however, there has mingled from the beginning a destructive type, which went West because it could

not prosper at home, and which could not prosper at home because it was too shiftless to prosper anywhere.

Such a class as this, of course, is a recognised part of any colonising movement. Its influence on the general character ✓ of the West has been too little emphasised. In our older Northern States it is commonly supposed that at first the West was dominated by fine energy, and that the disturbing element now evident there came either from foreign immigration or from the incursion of Southern " poor whites." In fact, it seems more likely that those Western regions whose political and moral condition now leaves most to be desired are those where native Northern blood preponderates. If this be true, the shiftless immigrants of Mrs. Kirkland's day, evidently what we should now call social degenerates, have proved a more important factor in our history than tradition has remembered. For in our national politics the West has grown, from the nature of our Constitution, to exercise an influence almost as disproportionate to its numerical population as that exercised by the slaveholding South. As the Territories have been admitted States of the Union, each new State has been represented in the Senate equally with New York or Massachusetts, Pennsylvania or Virginia. Our national legislation, then, has had sometimes to adapt itself to the vagaries of these new commonwealths, whose inexperience was at the outset extreme, and whose wisdom-political and moral alike—often seems remote from recognised standards.

Our chief concern, however, is not with politics or even with society; it is rather with those aspects of feeling and temper which tend toward something which the West has not yet achieved, - namely, literary expression. Glimpses of these, as they appeared to foreign eyes, are to be found in the familiar old books of travel which formerly so incensed Americans against Mrs. Trollope; and a little later in those caricatures of "Martin Chuzzlewit" which so displeased American sensibilities that American readers are prone to for

get how the same book caricatures the English too, in such figures as Mr. Pecksniff and Mrs. Sarah Gamp. A very different picture of the Middle West, a little later, is to be found in a book which in certain moods one is disposed for all its eccentricity to call the most admirable work of liter-✓ ary art as yet produced on this continent. This is that Odyssean story of the Mississippi to which Mark Twain gave the grotesque name of "Huckleberry Finn." The material from which he made this book he carelessly flung together a year or two before in a rambling series of reminiscences called "Life on the Mississippi." Mrs. Trollope, "Martin Chuzzlewit," "Life on the Mississippi," and "Huckleberry Finn" will combine to give a fair notion of Western life and character before the Civil War.

A picture of it, from a different point of view, may be found in a book of which the accuracy has been questioned. This is a loquacious "Life of Abraham Lincoln," by Mr. ✓ Herndon, at one time Lincoln's partner in the practice of law. Without power enough either to perceive or to set forth the traits which made Lincoln, whatever his faults, the most heroic American figure of the nineteenth century, Herndon, an every-day Western lawyer, was thoroughly familiar with the society amid which Lincoln grew up, and from which he ultimately emerged into national public life. Herndon, too, was so gossipy that he could not help writing vividly. As is generally known, Lincoln's family history resembled that of the shiftless immigrants sketched by Mrs. Kirkland. That so admirably powerful a character could spring from such humble origin is generally recognised among the hopeful facts of our national history. Herndon's book reveals a phase of the story hardly evident elsewhere. As you read the incidents of Lincoln's youth, whatever the authenticity of this anecdote or that, you can hardly avoid the impression that the social surroundings in which his life began were astonishingly like those of the Middle Ages. These people, of course, dressed in garments,

and used words, and had traditions which imply various occurrences since early Plantagenet times. It is hardly excessive to say, however, that their general mental and moral condition was more like that attributed to the English peasantry in the days of Richard Coeur de Lion than like any native English existence much more recent. Amid the relaxed inexperience of Western life the lower sort of Americans had tended to revert towards a social state ancestrally extinct cenJturies before America was discovered. During Lincoln's career the West was rapidly settling; and as you read Herndon you have a curious sense that months and years are doing the work of generations and centuries. It is as if in 1809 Lincoln had been born under King Richard I.; and when the man was fifty years old, he was abreast of our own time. One thing which contributed to his amazing power was this exceptional social environment, of which Herndon's book gives so vivid a picture. Almost alone of eminent Americans, Lincoln had chanced to know the inexperience of our native country in almost all its phases.

In our Western regions this extraordinary confusion of the centuries is not yet past. The essay which Mr. Owen Wister has prefixed to his stories, "Red Men and White," points out that in the Far West there are still regions of which the civilisation is much less mature than that of Elizabethan England. Everybody knows that our national government has somehow to reconcile the purposes and interests of societies widely different in climatic conditions and historic origin. Even New England and New York differ in some respects; both alike differ from the older Southern colonies; and the Northwest differs from the Southwest, and Louisiana from everything else; and so do the regions of Spanish origin. Mr. Wister points out the less salient fact that varying phases of American inexperience have thrown certain parts of our country back into the Middle Ages, while others amid accumulating experience have advanced to fully modern conditions. The